 Ie ddweud i'r 29 ymddangos y Pethau i'r Ysgrifennidau, Ysgrifennidau i'r Ysgrifennidau, a Ysgrifennidau i'r Ysgrifennidau i'r Ysgrifennidau i'r Ysgrifennidau, yn 2022, a weithio'r cymdeithasol o'r Stephen Kerr, so ei ddweud i'r ddweud i'r rhaid. Yr 1st ymgyrch ar y gendag ydy ymdyn nhw ymddiadau dros ymgyrch ymgyrch ymddangos i'r Ysgrifennidau Creserys, ysgrifennidau Scotland, ac mae'n gweithio'r Clare Hohi, Children's Services, the Unit Head, Iona Colvin, chief social work advisor, and Donna Bell, the director of social care and national care service development. The ministers will each give a short opening statement, and can I start with Mr Stewart, please, followed by Ms Hohi? Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to you and to the committee. Many thanks for having Ms Hohi and myself here today. I'll give an overview of our approach to the bill. Ms Hohi will focus on services for children and young people in the context of the national care service, and I should say at the outset that no decision has been taken on transferring children's services or criminal justice to the national care service. It's fair to say that the national care service is one of the most ambitious reforms of public services, which will end the postcode lottery of care provisions across Scotland. It will ensure access to consistent, high-quality care and support, enabling people to live a full life. The NCS bill sets out the framework for the changes that we want to make and allows scope for further decisions to be made later through a co-design process. That flexibility enables the national care service to develop, adapt and respond to specific circumstances over time. I want to take time to reflect on why change of this scale is necessary. Scotland's community health and social care system has seen significant incremental change over the past 20 years. Despite that, people with the experience of receiving care support and providing it have been clear that there are some significant issues. We are not just changing to address the challenges of today. We must ensure that we build a public service fit for tomorrow. Today, about one in 25 people receive social care, social work and occupational health support in Scotland. Demand is forecast to grow and the NCS must be developed to take account of our future needs. We will build a system that is sustainable and future-proof to take account of the changing needs of our population. The principles of any new system will be person-centred. That means that the NCS will be delivered in a way that respects, protects and fulfills the human rights of people accessing and delivering care and support. I was at Turning Point Scotland in Perth on Monday to hear about their excellent work on supporting people with complex needs, including preventative work with school leavers to turn their lives around. Their work highlights the value of focusing on the whole person and collaborating across boundaries. Our co-design process will ensure that the NCS is built with the people that it serves and those that deliver it at its very heart. We are committed to working with people, with first-hand experience of accessing and delivering community health and social care, to ensure that we have a person-centred NCS. We have to have a care service that is person-centred that best fits the needs of people who will use and work in its services. Mr Stewart has spoken about what we hope to achieve with the reform of Scotland's community health and social care system. I would now like to speak about the impact that the NCS will have on services for children and young people. The NCS will provide support for adults, children's parents, their grandparents, their adult siblings. The most important structure around children is their family and services need to wrap around the family. Children become adults and transition between services, which is often a difficult process. The current landscape is complex with 31 integration authorities taking a variety of approaches to the integration of children's services with adult, community health and justice services. We have to ask ourselves, is the best way to help children for these services to be together or apart? To answer that question, we have commissioned independent research to consider how children's services are currently delivered across Scotland. No change is not an option, so it would be too risky not to consider including children's services now. However, I want to reiterate Mr Stewart's point that no decision has been made about whether children's services will be included in the national care service or not. The bill provides the mechanism to include children's services in the NCS by secondary legislation if we ultimately decide what is best for children, young people and families. The full detail of any proposal to include children's services in the NCS will be available for scrutiny, consideration and consultation. The independent care review told us that significant change is needed to improve the care and support that children and young people receive. All of us here and across all the organisations that work with children and families are committed to delivering the promise. Building on this approach to getting it right for every child, we are continuing to make improvements that we need to see in children's services, and this work will not pause because of the national care service. Strong links with other services that support children, education, early learning and childcare must be maintained and strengthened whatever the decision is. I also recognise the challenges and demand those working with children and families face every day. If we were to transfer children's services to the national care service, it must improve the experience of the workforce. We want to carefully consider whether it would be best to include services that support children and young people in the national care service. Meanwhile, we will make sure that the needs of children and young people are a key consideration in the development of the national care service. Over the past two committees sessions, we have heard from various stakeholders and quite an extensive list as well. No one is looking for or demanding children's services to be included in the national care service. Most were ambivalent at best and they were overwhelmingly concerned that this was an absolute giant distraction that would get in the way of them doing their work. Can you honestly say that this will not be a bureaucratic monster that will get in the way of children's services providing the care that is needed? Why are those on the front line so not convinced that this is the right approach to be taking? I think that the committee can be well assured that this will not become a bureaucratic nightmare. This is about improving services for people right across the country. As we have said already, we are doing the groundwork, as Ms Hoge has outlined, to look at whether it is right to include children's services in national care service. I know that some people are not in favour of this change. However, what can be said is that the voices of lived experience have highlighted to us over the course of the discussions that we have had over the past 18 months around some of the difficulties that they experience in terms of accessing care and support. One of the key things for people is transition phases, for example. The movement from children's services to adult services is not smooth for a lot of people in our country at this moment. In some parts of the country, those scenarios are much better than others. Again, if you talk to the voices of lived experience, they will make it quite clear some of their views about where it works best. Where it works best—this is my opinion here—is in those areas where greater integration has occurred, where the scenario is that IJBs have delegations of various things, including children's social work, social care services and children's health services. That, without a doubt, is the view of many folks. We are lucky enough to have Iona Colvin as our chief social worker, but before she came to work in government, she said that she had a vast range of experience in life, but she was a chief officer in North Ayrshire, a health and social care partnership, where there is a greater degree of integration. It may be an idea to hear from Ms Colvin about her previous experiences in that. I think that the first thing to say is that the current status quo is not going to be an option if we are going to have a national care service with adult services in it. That was one of the first considerations in thinking about what the options are for children's services. As the ministers have said, the decision has not been made yet. Time has been spent looking at it. For me, one of the key factors is the relationship to the adult care services. Children do not come into the care system mostly because of actions of themselves, it is mainly because of their parents or their families. Usually it is because of drug or alcohol misuse or mental health problems or sometimes disproportionately people with learning disability, as well as parents with learning disability. There is a real core connection for me in terms of the family support element. In North Ayrshire, we had agreed that the elected members and the health board had agreed to delegate all of the children's services into the partnership. We also did an arrangement where we delegated mental health services for children, and I was the director of mental health for Ayrshire and I was also the director of health and social care in North Ayrshire. What that meant, and they carry on now in North Ayrshire, are doing tremendous interests and stuff, was that we were able to pool resources to begin to look at how we develop seamless services around children and young people. Mental health is a classic where there was really a divergence between health services and social work, for example, and the third sector is really important. What it allowed us to do was to begin to look at how you began to join those services up around children, but also how we take a family focus on the adult side of services as well. That is the really important point here. When children are at risk of being taken into care, because this is not just about when they come into care, most of this is about how do we prevent them coming to a point of coming into care. I think that being able to bring together your health and your social work services for children allows you to look at opportunities to work upstream as well. Working in the schools, for example, to support the teachers and to support a whole school approach around children, I am working in the nurseries, and North Ayrshire has a really good integrated universal team that is using the health visiting service to push out multidisciplinary services. In our health visiting service, they have an infant mental health nurse, they have a CAMHS nurse, and they have social workers, so that they can push through at an earlier stage that kind of support. I think that that is the opportunities that are afforded here. I would say that the health and social care partnership there, in my experience, also manages to work even though all those services are managed within health and social care. They are working in schools, they are working in the nurseries, and I think that that is one of the opportunities. I am sure that the committee has some of that information already, but we can provide more of it. There are 31 integration authorities in Scotland at the moment, some operate with fully delegated powers for community children's health services, children's social care services and justice social work services. We can provide a breakdown to the committee of where those things are currently happening, where those delegations are complete if you do not have them. Thank you very much for the answer from Ms Colvin. I know that we will pick on that thread later on with questions from Mr Marra, but I suppose that everyone who has come to the committee that has presented evidence has always said to us that structural change is not the answer. We had Ross McGuffey from North Lanarkshire tell the committee last week that transformative change takes time and sometimes we end up reaching the next restructure before the current one has had the chance to be where it needs to be. I know how complex IGB and that legislation is, so I recognise that that is not the answer. We need to do something, but would it not be better to improve the current system that is currently taking place and take our time investing in that than perhaps going through the magnitude? That is where my concern is in terms of that huge structural change. We need to get managers in place rather than really focusing on those that are in there and working with our children and families delivering services. The reason why we have embarked on this journey of national care service is not because it is a whim of the Government. It comes from the Derek Feeley report in terms of the independent review of adult care, which highlighted a number of things and made a huge number of recommendations, including the formation of a national care service. During our discussions with stakeholders, with the voices of lived experience and others, before we went to consultation, people were telling us that this should encompass more. We have been very careful in the way that we have done this. The consultation showed that over 70 per cent of folk wanted to see a national care service. Many of those folks wanted to see the transfer of services such as children's services and criminal justice and social work into the national care service. We did not fully go ahead with all that. That is why we are doing all the work that we are doing and ensuring that we get this absolutely right. Whether something is in or out, we have to make sure that the linkages are right. There are a number of things that folk highlighted to us. One of the main ones was accountability. People felt that there was no accountability in many cases in their areas. Lots of folk highlighted the fact that, often, they are pushed from pillar to post when they are told that that is the responsibility of the health and social care partnership, that is responsible to the local government, and that is the responsibility of the health board. That is frustrating for people when they are trying to get the care and support that they need. The other key element of that was folk that wanted to see national accountability. That national accountability means that ministers can set national high-quality standards that will apply across the board and end the postcode lottery. That does not mean to say that it is a centralisation because local care boards will continue to shape and deliver services in their own locales, but they will have to abide by those national standards. The accountability aspect is one of the things that is way up the agenda of people. Why is it way up the agenda? It is because of the implementation gaps that they are currently in the system. In my opening remarks, I talked about the 20-year journey of integration. There has been change, and there has been change for the better, but there are still a lot of implementation gaps. Why is that the case? We have not involved people enough in shaping those services. We are all about ensuring that, as we move forward, that this is co-designed with people in order for us to get it right, to close those implementation gaps and to deliver better services for people. We will find today that we might jump around a bit in terms of some of the statements that you just made there. I know that there are questions on those comments later on, so I hope that we can all keep track of that. I go to Mr Dave, who has got a follow-up on mine before we go to Mr Rennie. You talked about addressing the postcode lottery, Mr Stewart, and getting a service fit for tomorrow. We would all want that. You also talked about the implementation gaps. In the evidence that the committee has taken so far from some of the professionals, there was an underlying admission on their part, certainly that I took from it, which was that this is a sector that, in part, is resistant to change and has been resistant to change for some time. We see that with the IJBs and the variation and the extent to which services are delivered locally. Given that, what makes you confident that the national care service, with all its laudable aims, will deliver what you want it to, given that you will have people on the ground charged with delivering this, who may well be culturally resistant to change in general and this specific change? I recognise that legislation and regulation does not necessarily change cultures. We have examples of that in terms of some of the very good pieces of legislation that have been before this Parliament before. Probably the best example that I can give is self-directed support, whereby we put forward, on a cross-party basis, the ability for folk to have more independence and autonomy in terms of their care. There were four different options that people could access that best suited their needs. We know that, in some parts of the country, that works immensely well, and in others it does not. Rather than stick with the spirit of the legislation, in some places people have looked for the flaws within the legislation and found them, and given reasons why certain things should not apply to certain folks. That is not good enough to be honest. We are about to publish new guidance around self-directed support. It will help with some of the difficulties that people face, but there is still the edginess to the primary legislation. One of the reasons why we are embarking on this co-design journey is to have all people, those voices of lived experience and stakeholders, to shape how we move forward in this. Beyond that, by bringing some of the elements into certain legislation, it means that we can change quite quickly if we find those flaws, which we have been unable to do in terms of self-directed support because it is enshrined in primary legislation. There is a greater flexibility there. On the cultural aspect, there are a number of things. That flexibility will help to change cultures. Beyond that, having the voices of lived experience at the heart of what we are doing, people have asked me who I see being on care boards. Obviously, there are folks who are going to have to be there, but I have tried to keep steam on that because that is a matter for the co-design as well. The one thing that I am absolutely adamant on is that the voices of lived experience must be on local care boards and must have votes. That will help us to change the cultures to, I would hope, I would imagine, it will happen. You can also cite the carers act as another example where local delivery has not lived up to the expectation of the legislation. As I read it, this proposal has a potential to help to address that and give carers a better deal. Absolutely. I mean, I was at the carers' parliament the week before last. From the questioning from the floor to the panel, a large amount of that questioning was around about why is it that money that is allocated to my area is not being spent on carers. Now, as folk around the table know, convener, the Government has said that it is not going to ringfence large elements of money that it gives to local authorities. Obviously, local authorities make choices, but, in some regards, there is a real difficulty for folks who care for people when they cannot access services, when they know that money that is being sent for carers is not going to carers. Off the top of my head is some £84.5 million that the Government is now sending per year to ensure that the carers act is lived up to. If you talk to some folk out there, including a man from Shetland who is at the carers' parliament, who has FOI'd the information and canogate it about what Shetland is doing, I am checking up on that because that allegation has to be checked up on. However, we have to make sure that that money is going to carers. The other element in the bill, and a very important element in the bill in terms of carers, is enshrining into law that right to short-term breaks. That is absolutely essential. I am not sure that it is correct to brand the senior people that we had before this committee as recalcitrants as resistant to change. We had Claire Burns from Celsus who was talking about concern about unpicking everything. We had Martin Crue who has decades of experience in the children's service. He is saying that I cannot see that the NCS would have a big positive impact. Jackie Irvine from the Care Inspectorate is talking about disruption. I am not sure that it is right to just dismiss them as resistant to change. My main question is about the fact that children's services were clearly an afterthought. Why were they not included in the Feeley report? And why haven't you still yet, even though you are going through the process of legislation, decided whether it is included or not? First of all, I have not talked about anybody being resistant to change this morning. I just want to put that in the record. Sometimes we have to take folk on a journey around about seeing the benefits of the change that we embark on. To answer Mr Rennie, the Government, in the previous term, Jean Freeman, asked Derek Feeley to look at adult social care in that independent review took place. I am not going to go through all of the elements of that because I am quite sure that the committee is very well aware of the recommendations that Mr Feeley made. After that, we, as a Government, went and talked to the voices of lived experience around about the recommendations. That includes folks from the likes of the social covenants steering group who have real experience of where service works and where it does not for them. What became very apparent from those discussions, and not only with the voices of lived experience, but with stakeholders too, is that folks thought that there should be a widening out of that and that we should look at that. That is why we included questions in our consultation to look at whether there was an appetite for moving beyond adult social care. There has been an appetite in terms of the responses that we have had. However, you asked a pertinent question about the work that we are doing, not only in children's services but also in criminal justice in other areas. If we are going to do that, we have to have the evidence and the reasoning for doing it. That is why we are carrying out the review work at this moment, which I am sure Ms Hawke will tell us much more about. Following on from what my colleague is saying, the independent review in the adult social care made recommendations that we said are equally applicable to children's services. Having fairness and equity, removal of variation in eligibility, in charging, in commissioning and in removing unwanted variation across services, local authorities and IJBs. Given the change that the national care service bill, if it is passed, would bring, it would be too risky not to consider the inclusion of children in the national care service. None of us would want to think of children as an afterthought. The interface between the services for adults and children has been a critical consideration considering the impact that the NCS could have on children's services. As Iona Colvin mentioned in her evidence, you cannot see children in isolation. Children live as part of families and they do not live in silos. Their needs are not singular. We are looking at that in the round. The public consultation that Mr Stewart mentioned in 2021 included questions on children's social work and children's social care services. The responses to that were mixed and key stakeholders highlighted that there would be the need for more evidence. That is what we have set out to do. You are not looking at it as a whole system, are you? You have decided already that you are creating a national care service that will have ramifications for children's services. You are not looking at it in the round. You have decided that you are going to take one part out of the system and then you are going to decide, as an afterthought, what children's services are going to do in response to that disruption. You are not looking at things in the round. You have talked an awful lot this morning about co-design. If the co-design process, which is presumably going to include the recipients of the services, as well as those who provide them, decides that it would be better to leave things as they are in terms of structure, are you going to undo all that? We are going to have a national care service to deal with adult social care. That was a recommendation from Feeley. That is what the voices of lived experience want. That is what many stakeholders want. We are going to look at, as we have explained this morning, whether or not to include other elements, including children's services and criminal justice services. If, as part of that co-design, folk say that those elements might not work, we have to be cognisant of that, because we are not going to be dismissive of folk in the sector or of the voices of lived experience. However, as I said earlier, no matter what is in national care service, we have to make sure that the linkages are there between NCS and the services that remain outwith NCS. One of the things is that, today, the concentration will be should this be out. On Thursday, there were folks at the social justice committee who were saying that housing and homelessness services should maybe be in. That makes my point for me. You are making this up as you go along. You are deciding already that you are going to have a big disruption with a new law to create a national care service without even deciding what is going to be in the national care service. That is making it up as you go along. The Government stood in a manifesto of creating a national care service to cover adult social care. What we have done since then is have listened to people who have said that we should make other considerations as well, which we are looking at, which we included in questions in terms of the consultation. We are carrying out, as the committee is well aware, work to look and review all of that suggestions. No matter what is out or in national care service, we have to ensure that the linkages are there. This work is valuable work, no matter what, in order to get it right in terms of the delivery for people. At the heart of getting it right for delivery for people should people be at the heart of co-designing that one. That is clearly not the case. How much will it cost, additional cost, be for restructuring in this to include children's services? What will be the cost of including children's services? The financial memorandum as it stands includes everything that is covered off by the bill. I have said to the finance committee what the Government has said to the finance committee is that we will bring forward at each stage the business cases for each aspect of delivery as we move forward. That will give Parliament the transparency, the openness to scrutinise all of that as we move forward. Mr Rennie is well aware that in terms of a financial memorandum, that covers the bill, and that is what we have done. In terms of a figure for particular things, if I were to pluck a figure from the air at this moment— I am not once going to pluck a figure, I am asking just to give me an accurate figure. I cannot understand—this proves the point that you are making up as you go along—you do not know how much this will cost. In terms of the financial memorandum that covers off the aspect of the bill itself, in 2026-7, if we transfer children's services to care boards, from the financial memorandum, 2627, 1.5 billion would be that figure. We will clarify all of that as we move forward with Parliament. I know that some folk want me to do the annual budgeting for the next umpteen years around about that, which Mr Swinney would not be particularly happy with if I were to do so. We have said to the finance committee that, as we move forward beyond the financial memorandum and what it has in the financial memorandum, we will bring forward every business case for scrutiny. The finance committee has criticised, including members of your own party, for not having the finances. You quoted 1.5 billion. That is not the cost of restructuring to include children's services. That would be the cost, I presume, of the actual children's services themselves. I am asking what would be the additional cost of including children's services in the national care services structure. We have in the financial memorandum a range of figures around about the restructuring costs, including on page 6 of the financial memorandum, which is the total estimated costs of the bill provisions, which give ballpark figures. For care boards, the £2526 figure is £132 to £326 million, £2627 to £342 to £376 million. We can spell out more of the financial memorandum to the committee if that is what the committee requires. We can also provide the committee with a comprehensive report, or we can get officials to come and speak to the committee about the financial memorandum and the workings of the financial memorandum, much of which I have been questioned about already by the finance committee, and the figures are there within that financial memorandum. If the figures are there, it was your own member, Mr Stewart, from Michelle Thomson, who said, I feel as though whether you are under pressure of timescales to deliver on this. From financial scrutiny, I am looking at a blank check for the public purse, and I find that deeply worrying. I think that that is what we are trying to get over here. We are in a position right now where there are significant pressures across budgets. Is this the right time to be doing this? There are significant pressures across budgets, and last week's UK budget did not help in that regard. Mr Stewart, does an extra £1.5 billion come into the Scottish Government? I would dispute that, convener, but I think that we probably better not go into the nationations of that today. Beyond that, convener, as I highlighted earlier, we cannot afford to stand still here in terms of national care service. We know that we need to build services that are fit for the future. We have to build services that are sustainable. We have to build services that meet the needs of the changing demographics of our population. That is required, so there can be no standing still. However, what I cannot do here today is to give you the annual budgeting for each aspect of service delivery, because that is dealt with on an annual basis. I have reiterated to the finance committee the fact that, as we move forward in all of this, we will bring forward all the financial cases and business cases for the decisions that we make as we move on. I think that the unknowns here are clearly alarming and should be a concern to us all. Can I move to questions now from Michael Marra, please? It is just a short one on this area, convener. How many children's social workers are you proposing to move to the national care service, Ms Hawley? If the decision is made that children's services will be moved to the national care service, then those services will move under the national care service. Social workers? I cannot give you an exact figure just now. There are a number of elements here that are important. I have said previously at the, I am forgetting which committee I have been to now, there need not be a wholesale transfer of staff to national care service. I have explained that in terms of social care and in terms of social work, our ambition is to create a national social work agency, but that may not lead to a huge wholesale transfer of staff either, but we need to work our way through that. What we definitely need to do in terms of social work is to make sure that, no matter what, we look at pay, conditions and other aspects. If I could finish this, convener, because this is extremely important. That is not an answer to my question, Mr Stewart. My question was how many social workers will be transferred, and I think the answer is that you do not know. So there is no decision being taken on that. That is part of the co-design. Mr Stewart, I think that it should be a simple question with Ms Hawley. So Mr Stewart has answered that. I can tell you what the overall headcount for children's social services is. Be useful. Yeah, okay. So in 2021, the overall headcount for children's social services was 15,300. That is an increase of 6.7 since 2021. The largest two sub-sectors in children's social services were in residential care and fieldwork social work. Fieldwork social work accounts for 38 per cent of the total headcount. That fieldwork social services covers social work services. In 2021, 9,100 of the children's social services workforce were employed by a public employer, and not all social workers are employed by public employers. 24 per cent are employed by the voluntary sector and 16 per cent are employed by the private sector. Of course, that does not necessarily mean that all those employees are social workers. They are some of them social care workers. However, we do not have an idea at the moment how many of those people would be transferred to a new body. I think that I am not asking about them just to clarify what you were saying. I think that that is the case. That is what Mr Stewart has just said. We do not know whether they will transfer or not. If we can come here and just finish on this, the Scottish Association of Social Workers has asked for a pause on this, as you will be aware. They are gravely concerned I think about the shape of this because they do not have the answers to this. Have you taken into the financial memorandum any consideration of pensions, which are not included under TUPI, and what would happen to social workers' pensions? Mr Marra, I think that in terms of all of this, we have to look at the national social work agency proposals and come up with a co-design around about this. I will bring Ms Coffin in a minute. I must make these points. We have a situation at this moment in which there is no single national body task with having oversight of leading social workers' professional development, education and improvement. There is desperate pay and conditions across the country, which leads to difficulties in recruitment and retention in many areas. Those are issues that have been highlighted by social workers over the peace and we have to ensure that we get those things right. There is also no mechanism at the moment to secure placements required as part of future social work planning. As several organisations advocate, deliver and advise on social work education at the moment, it has not been possible to scale up best practice. In order for there to be improvement in all of this, we need to look at change. In establishing a national organisation for training, development and recruitment and retention for adult social care support, including a specific social work agency for the oversight of professional development, it is something that a lot of people believe is the right thing to do. I get the point that some of the organisations want a pause, but they also want to be at the heart of co-designing the elements of a national social work agency and how we get that right as we go forward. I will pass over to Ms Collin. The questions from Michael Marra are specifically around numbers and finance, are not they, Mr Marra? No, they were. I do not know the answer. If the answer that comes from Ms Collin will respond to the specifics that Mr Marra is looking for, that would be helpful. Is there a particular reference to social workers' working conditions in pensions and whether that has been factored into the financial calculations? No. Okay. Can we move to questions now from Ross Greer, please? Thank you, Ross. Thank you, convener. Ministers, I accept what you said this morning in terms of the current state of play being a postcode lottery across local authorities in terms of the services that are provided to children, but a lot of the evidence that we have taken in recent weeks, particularly for all local authorities, made the point that, especially in the areas where children's services are performing well, they are extremely well integrated in the other services that local authorities provide to children, particularly education. How would centralising children's care services to the new bodies? Surely that would be a step backwards in terms of our attempts to create a consistent network of support for each individual young person from all the various places in which they might need that, whether it is an education setting, a care setting or elsewhere. We absolutely know that there are some areas of extremely good practice, I think that I want to call them in reference one in North Ayrshire, and great examples of a shared multidisciplinary culture with a shared goal of improving services for children and for families. We are looking at whether children's services are within a national care service, the opportunity that that would give us to scale those up, to have those national standards, to drive that good practice in other areas where perhaps it is not as good as in some areas that we can cite. It would give us the opportunity to do that. I think that the points that you raised about education and early learning are important ones, and ensuring that those linkages remain strong and that they are built on is absolutely key. That is really important. Of course, all the Government's work with children and young people is underpinned by GERFIC, so getting it right for every child and by extension into the care service, getting it right for everyone, so those principles would remain the same, that the care and the support for that child, for that family should be individualised, should be for their needs and should be a wrap-round service. That is the opportunity that we are looking at in the children's services. Being included in the national care service, that gives us the opportunity to expand that across the country by having those national standards. If the decision is made at a later point to include children's services, that will, presumably, entail a decision or a calculation of how much that is currently spent by local authorities on children's services is moved to the new delivery bodies. Given what I have just said and the evidence that we have taken about the high level of integration in some authorities between children's care services and other services that they provide to children, how will you make that calculation of what to take from what is currently in the local government general revenue grant? There are a number of points there, and I will come back to the general revenue grant in a second, but I think that you make an absolutely excellent point around those areas where there is a greater degree of integration and where we are seeing very, very good service delivery. Iona Colvin talked about North Ayrshire earlier and another good example is East Renfrewshire. We want to ensure that that service delivery remains, but not only in East Renfrewshire, but we can export those good services with those right linkages right across the board and across the country. We have the opportunity to be able to do that as we move on. In terms of the general revenue grant, Mr Greer was at the finance committee and questioned me there around the impact on local government in terms of budgetary terms, depending on what is in or out. I give Mr Greer the same pledge here, as I did at the finance committee, which is that we will do our utmost to ensure that there is cost neutrality in all of that for local government as we move forward. I am sure that local government will welcome that statement. I am interested in the process by which that will be achieved, minister, because at the heart of my question is this point of how complicated it is going to be, how well integrated those services are in some places, so how difficult it will be to disaggregate them. I am interested in what process you will follow to make that calculation and to ensure that it is cost neutral. Mr Greer, convener, will be very well aware again from the committee that I indicated that all the work that we are doing at this moment, including this review word, will look at all of that as we move forward. As we propose and make those changes, we will bring all the elements of the business cases for that to committees and to Parliament in order that that can be scrutinised. I would imagine that a huge amount of other stakeholders will be scrutinising us in that front, too. There are difficulties in terms of some of those calculations. As the committee is well aware, it is often quite difficult for us to get certain aspects of data. In all of that, too, that creates a good ability to improve data collection as we move forward, so that we know some of the spend that goes on out there, which we are not quite sure of at this moment. It goes back to Mr D's point about carers. We know—the Government knows—that it is 84, 85 million, if I remember rightly, and if it is not, I will correct it, that it goes to local authorities to ensure that the carers act to say that we are not absolutely certain that all of that money is spent on that particular service. We have got a lot of ground to cover and I am very aware that we are not making that much progress in some of no disrespect, but some of the answers are quite lengthy. Can I ask for some brevity and some concise answers, please, if that is possible? Ross, if you have any further questions, please, please. I am happy to finish at that point. Thank you, Ross. Can we now move to questions from Stephanie Callaghan? Chapter 3 is about creating an NCS charter. Will that be a touch stone for the work to develop the NCS and is the charter likely to be limited to principles or include rights and responsibilities? You have also touched on improving accountability. I am interested in how that might work in practice for individuals and, with that in mind, whether ministers should have a duty to ensure that advocacy services are available for children and young people with disabilities and additional support needs? Some of the early work that we are doing and co-design is on the charter of rights and responsibilities. I was very pleased to be able to attend a virtual event last week, or the week before last, around how we build that charter. Facing a fair amount of challenging questions, it has to be said by many stakeholders about how we get this right. That is what we need today. We need to be pretty challenging in all of these regards. We want to make sure that, in that co-design, it is as inclusive as possible. We absolutely need to hear from a myriad of voices around how we get this right, because many people have been failed in the system previously. We have already garnered a lot of views, but there are missing voices as well, and we have to do better in ensuring that they, too, are at the table in terms of helping us to create the charter itself. You mentioned young people with disabilities. Many disabled folks have been excluded from deciding helping to shape those things previously. We want them to be at the table. We have had some criticism—I think that it is fair criticism—from some ethnic minority groups that they have been excluded in terms of some of those designs in the past. Again, we are going out of our way to try to get folks from those communities involved, too. I will bring in Iona Clawvin for a brief bit, and I will maybe come back. I am going to interject again. Sorry. I was wondering if Ms Hawley might want to respond to that question as well before we go to you. As a minimum, the charter will set out the rights and responsibilities in relation to the NTS of people accessing support their information on the complaints and redress system, which will provide recourse if rights in the charter are not met, and information on how they access information, advice and advocacy services, which was one of the points that Ms Callaghan made. That is a minimum, but, as Mr Stewart is saying, we are consulting, including with children and young people, on exactly what that charter of rights should include. Those are the basic minimums. I remind the panel that we are focusing on the children's element. We know that there is extensive work going on with the national care service across adult services, but we really need to drill down, which is what your questions are on, Stephanie. If we can pick up your questions, that would be super, Stephanie. That is fine. You have already said today as well about the local care boards continuing to shape those changes at local level. Some wonder to what degrees you expect ministers will be responsible for service delivery and directing those care boards. How will any shift in the powers and responsibilities of local and national government make sure that flexibility to adapt to those local circumstances is not lost? It is absolutely essential that local care boards continue to have the flexibility that is required to deliver for their area. They will have the responsibilities for delivery in their area, they will have the responsibility for shaping services in their area and they will have the flexibility. However, the important element is, of course, that they will have to work to the national high-quality standards. That stops postcode lotteries, but it does not stop innovation in terms of the ability for local care boards to be as flexible and to meet the needs of the people and the communities that they serve. In terms of ministerial direction, in terms of that accountability element, which folk want to see rest with ministers, that is in the main is around about the setting of those standards and ensuring that those standards are met across the board in order to meet what we all want, which is the ending of those postcode lotteries that most definitely exist. Sometimes those postcode lotteries exist not only between areas, but also within areas as well, and we need to resolve those elements. Can we now move to some questions from Mr Bob Doris, please? I want to teach a couple of specific examples, because it can appear a bit vague what the national care service will look like for children. Given specific examples, that is important. Kinship care is an area that I have been campaigning in for a number of years to make sure that children and young people who otherwise would be looked after in a residential setting get the support that family members and loved ones require. There are currently 4,456 young people in formal kinship relationships in Scotland who get kinship care allowances, but those are very dramatic across Scotland. For example, for children between 5 to 10-year-olds, you can get £96 a week or £200 a week or anything in between across 32 local authorities. Is the expectation that that will be standardised under a national care service? If so, can you give an assurance that standardisation will be at the higher end and not the bottom end of that scale? Where is there a financial gap in relation to local authorities that are currently putting into that system? Who funds that gap? I think that there would be an opportunity to address that. If children's services are transferred into the national care service, I am aware of the history behind kinship allowances being different over different areas and different local authorities paying different rates and different allowances within each of their kinship care allowances. Transferred into the national care service at a national level with accountability for ministers being envisaged that NCS setting standards and national frameworks should be implemented at the local level by directly funded care boards. One of the key aims of the NCS is to end that postcode lottery across a number of areas that we have spoken about this morning, including consistency in areas in which there should be consistency, such as financial assistance to kinship carers. The short answer to that is yes. We think that that could help in terms of being able to ensure consistency of care allowances right across the piece rather than, as you say, currently paying different local authorities at different rates, which I appreciate can cause a frustration. The cause that is involved, you will probably say, that will be negotiations between local authorities and the national care board about who picks up the tag for that. If you are a local authority paying £100 a week and that is shaped to £300 a week, there is a financial consequence to that. If you are not able to see any more on that, that would be helpful. Also in kinship care, what there also is, is 32 different authorities. I think that the social work Scotland said that there is a lack of clarity of what another clarity in law minister, but there is a lack of clarity and criteria for kinship care as to when financial assistance is given. In the example that I have given given her consistently to this committee, a grand mum takes a child into her home after the death of the child's mum. Quite often, kinship care allowance is not granted. However, if social work turns up at the door with that child and says, really sorry, your daughter has been lost, you look after the grandchildren, kinship care payments are paid. That is just deeply unfair. There are 32 ways that are interpreted across Scotland. At a very local level, different social work service officers may interpret it differently on the ground also. Will that be addressed under the national care service? I am trying to get a reality of what that will look like on the ground rather than the abstract of a framework bill. I am very familiar with the narrative that Mr Doris gives. That gives us the opportunity to get that consistency right across the country. We have worked very closely with kinship carers and we have heard the concerns that they have. I think that that is one area that would give us that opportunity to have the national consistency for carers. I wanted to mention palliative care at the time to do that. You will, but Michael Marra has a question following up on kinship care before you move on to that, Mr Doris. Is that okay? Absolutely, yes. I think that incredibly important question is from Mr Doris. How much would that cost? Convener, as I said earlier on, those are things that we would bring forward in terms of business cases. We are doing the work at this moment to look at all aspects of that, to gather as much data as possible, and we will bring forward business cases for each of the elements that we need to deal with here. Mr Stewart, Ms Holly might have an answer to Mr Marra's question. What is currently happening? Obviously, we are talking about a national care service that may or may not have children services in there. As I am sure Mr Marra is aware, we are in negotiation with COSLA on this very issue and have been for some time. We are very keen to get a resolution to that. Obviously, within that, there would be a financial cost to the Scottish Government. No, it was this specific area, Ms Holly. My question essentially was how many care packages or how many kinship care payments to level up to the higher level, and how much does that cost? I do not think that that is a question that Mr Stewart could answer at the moment, but we are not waiting simply because I do not think that he has the figures in front of him. At the moment, we are working on this issue. I do not have that answer if we could provide that to the committee at this moment. We will see what we can do in terms of providing anything that the committee asks for in that regard. I just want to give Mr Marra the assurance that we are not waiting for a national care service to address this issue. That is helpful, but if it is possible and someone can provide us with the uplift that would be required to meet the committee— Can I say, convener, that in terms of that particular issue, we are still in discussion with COSLA around that, Ms Colvin has just told me. So we are reliant in some regards in getting this information from COSLA because we do not hold that information, that data, centrally. If we can get that information, we will get it to you. Thank you very much. Can we move back to Mr Doris now? I want to move on to palliative care, but in responding, it would be quite helpful to know, just in reference to kinship care, one of the issues—I will leave this hanging, then I will go to my substantive question—is that commissioning of complex services for trauma-informed care for young people in kinship environments that are quite often very vulnerable can see special facilities. There is one in my constituency minister looking for money from intricate joint board, from a local authority, from NHS direct, from a number of local authorities, and there is a bit of uncertainty around long-term funding in those situations for what are specialist facilities. I am hoping that the national care service may be able to improve that kind of situation, but that is not a substantive question. I want to put that on the record. I chair the cross-party group palliative care in the Scottish Parliament, and I have to say that the engagement with the Government has been fantastic. I know that palliative and end-of-life care will form part of a new national care service. I also know that there is a new national palliative care strategy pending, but there are a check. There are 16,700 children based on 20 figures who would benefit babies, children and young people who would benefit from palliative and end-of-life care because of life-shortening conditions. Three die every single week tragically. There is good support out there, but it is sometimes inconsistent that support. I know that there has been good investment in the children's hospice network, but there is a feeling that integrated joint boards and others perhaps all do not have a coherent strategy across the country to give meaningful palliative care access to babies, children and young people. Is there anything that either ministers can say in relation to how you work with the sector to make that happen and make sure that the national care board drives forward improvements in that area? Part of the drive for the national care service is to have that consistency right across the country so that there would be access to the care that was needed when it was needed, regardless of the part of the country that you lived in. In terms of the specific commissioning for those services that you are talking about that would currently be commissioned by IGIBs, local authorities or health boards, that commissioning would be done by the national care service. Iona, do you have a little bit that you want to add? That commissioning would be done by local care boards, but let me expand on that. In all of us, there is the opportunity for a once-for-scotland approach for specialised services. One of the key aspects, key elements of the bill, is ethical commissioning and getting this right. I said that that commissioning would be done by local care boards, but we are also very well aware that for some specialisms, some very complex cases, there is real difficulty at this moment in getting it right for folks. That is why the bill itself also includes the ability to set up special care boards, and that those may be set up to deal with those once-for-scotland elements where there is more complexity. Is the committee could well imagine that crossing our desks on a regular basis are some pretty complex cases that health and social care partnerships, local authorities, health boards have a great difficulty in commissioning the right service for that individual because of the complexity of their needs. We have the ability here to make some real differences here and to take a national approach to some of that as well as allowing the flexibility at a local level. Is that you? For the moment, that is great. Can we move to questions now from Ruth McWagher? I would like to direct my questions to the minister for children and young people. The committee met in private with organisations that work with and represent children and young people, including care experienced children and young people, those affected by domestic abuse, children and young people in conflict with the law, new divergent children and young people, and young carers. Just to reflect on the situation at the moment in children's services, I suppose, and I think that we would all recognise that there is good work on going, but some of the feedback that we got from them were that families were being bounced around the system. A rights-focused approach has not been adopted across the system. It spoke to us about organisational gatekeeping and that children, young people and families often have to prove extreme need to access services. They said that there was no shared language between organisations on occasion and that responsibility shifted from organisation to organisation. We have had integration for more than 10 years, so my question is what about having a national care service, including children's services, will make those experiences better for children and families and how will we ensure that rights-based approach? I think that that is a very fair and reasonable question. I think that probably every MSP sitting around this table would have experienced constituency cases where families or children are approaching us with similar difficulties, concerns and worries. Those are issues that were raised during the consultation and during the events that Mr Stewart has been holding in, in his conversations with children and young people. I absolutely recognise those concerns. The integration has worked well in some areas and provides some excellent services. I do not want that to sound like I am criticising the staff working within those services, because they have gone above and beyond particularly over the past couple of years. I think that that is evidence of why we need that national consistency, why we need those minimum standards, why we need a charter for people's rights that they are able to claim and why we need those voices at the table when we are co-designing services, so that there are not the boundaries to accessing services, so that there is that consistency so that you can move from one local authority area to another and expect the same level of service. Unfortunately, the experiences that those children and young people have experienced are not uncommon and are a driving force. We are certainly a driving force behind the independent review and adult social care, but I also want to voice to perhaps why children's services should all be included. The minister previously talked about implementation gaps, and we know that we have lots of good policy and law, but sometimes the experience for our citizens does not reflect the good intentions there. We cannot ignore the resource aspect of that, so what is it about the national service that will help with that resource aspect of the implementation gap? If I can come in, convener, because Ms McGuire is absolutely right to concentrate on implementation gaps, the committee has talked and listened to a number of young people. In some regards, what we see in terms of resource is far too much resource being put in at crisis point and not enough in terms of prevention. What you will find is that those areas that concentrate in a more preventative way where the linked-up services are there spend much less on crisis. We need to recognise that much of the system—not just in children's services but in adult services—is focused on crisis spend at this moment, which costs a lot of money. There is also the human cost of not getting those preventative services right. I think that Ms Hawke is absolutely right in terms of the opportunity that we have in terms of—again, whether in or children's services are in and out—because of the work that we are doing at this moment, we can look at where things are not working and see what we can do to improve. That would be easier in some regards in terms of national standards within NCS, but that does not mean to say that we should not be aspiring to bringing up standards right across the board, whether out or in. My next question probably will not surprise you. Obviously, I think that everyone would subscribe to preventing problems before they happen. The real challenge is moving finance and resource from crisis to prevention. What about the national care service will help us to do that? A number of things, convener, in that regard. Again, I will talk about what folks have said to us at this moment. For many people—let's look at a good example from not so long ago—we talked to and listened to someone who, at the moment, has 15 different interventions in their life from a number of folks in social work and social care. It would be fair to say that that person felt that it would be much better if there was a much more joined-up approach rather than the fragmented approach with somebody dealing with each individual element of what is a very complex case. I am not going to go into the elements of that complexity because that could identify an individual possibly, and I am not wanting to do that. I think that there is the ability, without doubt, to look at that from the person-centred approach, listening to what folks' needs are and actually getting that a lot better, rather than us doing certain things to folk that are actually not helping them in any way, shape or form. I do not know whether that is helpful to Ms Beguir or not. You have another question, so maybe that might delve a bit deeper. Iona, you are hitting on a number of the critical issues, Ruthie, I guess, and I am thinking about what Mr Rennie said earlier. We know that the system just now is not working. The independent care review told us very clearly that we have the promise, which we are all committed to, and it is clear. I think that the question of children's services that we have been talking about is what is the best way to deliver those services at the point of need. Your question is getting to the heart of that in terms of earlier intervention, which, in the long run, in the promise that I have shown in the work that they have done, saves money because it saves people coming into crisis. Our aim is to have less children in formal care, more children supported, less children overall supported, hopefully, as families cope and look after their own children. However, the system is a long way from that just now. The decisions around investment at a local level are taken locally, as you know, because she needs to be the treasurer, so she knows very well about the decision-making process. The prioritisation at a local level is very different. That also relates to Mr Doris' question around the local allowances, for example, because different councils make different arrangements in terms of what they invest in. As an IGIB chief officer, you spend most of your year negotiating your budget, negotiating with the health board on one side, negotiating with the council on the other side. It takes months and months, and then you have to go to all the usual, but basically that individual negotiation goes on most of the year. There are a couple of months in the middle of the summer where it stops for a wee while. I think that the focus is really difficult. Quite often that is done on an individual basis. I think that one of the very different proposals here for the national care services is that the funds are allocated directly and there is a more direct relationship between the fund, what it is spent on and accountability for that spend and understand this. I think that there is more of a direct relationship, but it is a complex one because it is not about setting in stone national requirements, but we are doing a lot of co-design work with people around—almost in my head, it is like a specification. If we talked about drug services, for example, which have been in the headlines this week, it is very important to children because their parents need to get into the rehab services so that they can continue to look after them. There needs to be a minimum expectation and a standard for what people can expect to get at a local level so that they do not have the postcode lottery, but those services need to flex around local need. For example, in some areas you have island communities and other areas you have, so they need to flex, but I think that that offers the opportunity to bring more standardisation delivered in a flexible way at the locality level. It is a complex relationship and that also means planning your investment so that you can invest more upstream to prevent and reduce the numbers. It is costing at the moment, for example, to take one child into superior care, six and a half thousand, one board and one local authority. This week, we have paid 6,600 per week for a child. That is where we need to get to, and that is what the promise is about. I guess that the question and the whole point of our research and the consideration is, how do we best deliver that? Can we move back to questions from Michael Marra, please, on the complexity? Thank you, convener. I found all those answers very useful, Ms Coffin's description. I suppose that the timing of that is a concern given that we have a national crisis in social care. Huge issues in terms of staffing of that service, paying for that service, which is causing and one of the main causes of the disaster that we are seeing on folding in our NHS as a result of the discharge. Are we not intending, at this point in time, to drop children's services, the most vulnerable young people, into the millstorm of a crisis situation? Is there not a risk? I think that I heard this quite clearly from our evidence so far that people are concerned about the risk of children's services being lost in a care service that has to deal with that crisis. It is about the children and the mental idea from Claire Hawthorne, please. Children and young people are right at the heart of the co-design of the service, which I think is really important. Ensuring that their voices are there at the table, and we are doing a lot of work with. We have been doing a lot of work with children and young people, a lot of hard to reach voices, disability organisations, children's disability representatives, so that we ensure that their voices are right at the heart of the co-design. That is important whether those children's services are in the national care service or not and their parents and carers too. I think that it almost runs counter to some of the arguments that I have heard about. We shouldn't be looking at children's services currently when you have not made a decision whether or not they should be in the national care service, but we have to design a national care service that will be able to provide that service for children if that decision is made so that they are not, and afterthought so that we are not doing that retrospectively, so ensuring that their voices are very much at the table. There are difficulties within adult social care services in terms of recruitment and retention and in children's services. Those are not unique to Scotland. There are multi-faceted reasons for why. There have been people who have left their adult social care and children's social care. They have returned home after Brexit. There have been difficulties in recruiting and retaining some of those staff, but we are working to continue to support the social care service so that we have staffing there. I can give you some examples of some of the work that we are doing currently across the social care services to support them in recruitment. Dropping those young people and their needs into that crisis and we could talk about the crisis and the causes of it, but there are concerns. We have had that in our evidence so far. That could almost be precisely the wrong moment to do this. Actually, there is a lot of risk that those children get lost in essentially a service that is being designed to deal with acute care issues. Is that not a risk that we could find those children lost in that huge issue that is on going at the moment? Hopefully some of the first pattern answer or the answer to your question answered a bit of it answered some of that, that we are ensuring that children and young people's voices are in the co-designed, so that they are at the table. I do not recognise what Mr Marr is saying about dropping in. That is potentially about providing services that give national standards, that give children's rights and that they do not currently have in terms of the charter that is being designed. There is risk either way. There is risk if we do not have children's services in the national care service. If we do put children's services into the national care service, we will recognise that. The task for the research that is being commissioned is to come to the best decision about where to place those services for the children that best serve them. There are going to be changes whether children's services are within a national care service or not. We need to be prepared for those changes, and that is the preparatory work that the Government has been doing through our engagement with children and young people in their families, through those organisations that represent them, but also through the research that we have commissioned to look at in evidence-based, for what is the best way to provide those services. Iona Colvin wants to come in on that point, if that is okay, Michael. I think absolutely that point that we are working with children and families to make sure that they are part of the code design so that they are not left out. It is not separate to the discharge of the promise either, so that there is work already under way. For example, the redesign of the children's hearing system is being led by the promise with children and young people at the heart, and Sheriff Mackie is chairing that. That is all part of the same thing. It is about how we reshape children's services as we move forward. To come to your point on recruitment and retention, I think that you started with, am I right? I think that one of the issues at the moment is, because I think that you said that by dropping children's services we would make it worse. What we are saying is that there is evidence that says that there is risk, and it is really about resourcing, I think, the question in terms of the resource and how that is spread. I think that just briefly that the recruitment and retention issue across social work and social care does need a national solution. I think that it has gone beyond the local solutions, and it is one of the opportunities in the national social agency particularly, which I am leading along with Alison from Sazwa and Ben from Social Work Scotland, is looking at how we produce some national approaches to help to try to resolve the current issues and difficulties that we have. I may come back briefly to that resource. Mr Rennie has a supplementary on that particular theme. The minister just talked about risk that we have presented with risk, but is it not the case that by moving ahead with a national care service, without having thought about where children's services go before he made a decision to proceed with it, has caused the risk? So is it not the case that the Government has caused the risk that you talk about? I would disagree with that, Mr Rennie. I think that what we are doing is we are taking a very measured approach to where the children's services should be included in the national care service, looking at the evidence, consulting with stakeholders, consulting with the people who are using those care services at the moment and helping them to co-design what could be the children's element of a national care service. I want to finish off on this area, and then I have one more about resource, if that is okay, convener. Would the Government be minded to amend schedule three of the act to narrow the scope of the powers and the bill relating to those issues to give some clarity in terms of what is in and what is out around children's services? I understand the arguments around co-design and the process, but it feels to me that we are in a kind of a back to managing that risk and where those lines drop between services. The minister talked eloquently about the gap between different areas. Perhaps he could reflect on that and see whether that might be a possibility. More broadly, on the issues of resourcing, you have talked in your evidence today about national collective bargaining, essentially around social work services. You have talked about once-for-scotland commissioning of services in that area. You have talked about a variety of areas, such as the kinship care areas, about making sure that we level up the amount of money that is involved against it. I have not heard any analysis of the resourcing that might be against any of those areas. If I could start off on national collective bargaining, which Mr Marra talked about, I think that over many years the social work, social care profession has had difficulties in terms of paying conditions in social care because of the disparate amount of employers in Scotland. In social work, there has been some competition even between local authorities in terms of trying to attract folks. Beyond that, while paying conditions are extremely important and pay is way up there without a doubt, in listening to younger folk in social work and social care, one of the things that they want to see is a greater ladder for career progression, which they do not think is there at this moment, which I think again is something that we can build on in the national care service. In terms of the resourcing and all of that, without a doubt, there is a job of work to do in terms of looking at what the co-design comes up with and what the costing of that is. I am not coming here, as I have said earlier, to talk about annual budgets. That is a matter for Parliament. However, what we will do as we move forward with the co-design and with all elements of that is to come up with the cost and the benefits, because there may well be benefits rather than just costs to some of the things that are being proposed here or will be proposed during the co-design phase. That work will be on-going. As I have said to the committee and to others, to Parliament as a whole, we will come back with that analysis, with those business cases, around about our intentions in terms of change from those co-design works. I think that Ms Hawley wants to come in, Michael Marra, please. If that is okay, you are just sitting in particular in reference to your question about schedule 3 of the bill and the acts that are mentioned there. All of those acts contain social work-related local authority functions and duties, which is why they are included there, but we will give it on-going consideration to what is in, what is out, based on the evidence and the consultation and the research that has been commissioned. It is not set in stone, but we will give it on-going consideration to those acts. We are in listening mode. Co-design is not lip service. We are in listening mode. We have a supplementary on the theme from Bob Doris, please, or are you okay? Yes, that is very brief. On the funding issue with Mr Marra, convener, I get the impression that we cannot quite decide whether, if the national care service happens with children services partners, there is a big bang launch and it all happens, big shining new service overnight, or whether there is a strategic evolution of that service over a number of years. On to kinship care, convener, in costings, is the expectation that a national kinship care allows standardise across 32 local care boards would happen in the first instance, or there is a national commitment to that and it will be implemented over a number of years, which will have specific budgetary implications, both nationally and locally, which will have to be negotiated with COSLA and the Scottish Government. Listen to this debate, convener, it is like a big bang. If it happens, it is all fixed, and that is clearly not going to happen. Can you say a little bit more about how resourcing will be allocated going forward so that we do not oversell what we are trying to do here? I doubt that it is possible, but can we have a really concise answer to that question? I am looking at the clock and we have a number of other themes that we need to follow up on. Maybe it is very concise, Mr Stewart. It is probably not possible to give a concise answer, but I will do the best that I can. As Mr Doris rightly points out, there is not going to be a massive big bang here. We are going to have to phase all of that over time. What we are also going to have to do is look at what are the priority elements that should be brought forward first and what are the costs of those priorities. Your priority today has been on kinship carers, and I understand that from my own casework. Other folks' priorities may be on something else in terms of bringing up those standards. We are going to work our way through those. We are going to speak and listen, more importantly, to people what are the key elements for change first. Again, that is a key element of the co-design, and I am quite sure that people will be setting their priority stalls. We need to take cognisance of that as we bring all of that forward. That is very good for Mr Stewart this morning. Do you want to contribute to anything with Halyard? Can we move to questions from Mr Day? No, I am happy to move on. I want to put my analog on, convener, and deal with some of the nuts and bolts around some of that. I am interested in what work the Government is doing or planning to do to determine the exact number of nature of pieces of existing primary legislation that would be engaged by proceeding with the inclusion of children's services. I am also interested in what work is being done to identify the pathways that would have to be established to interact with those aspects of children's services that are not intended to be captured by proceeding with that. I guess what flows from that as well is that if you did proceed with the national care service for adults, which is the intention, but then decided not to proceed with children's services, again, new pathways would have to be established. What works going on currently or as intended to happen will identify the scale of the challenge here and the solutions, because we would all want to avoid those unintended consequences. Are you looking for a concise answer to that, convener? I do not think that that is possible, which is why I wanted the last one to be concise, so we could have a bit of time on this topic. I think that I covered some of the primary legislation that Mr Day alludes to in my answer to Mr Marra earlier. The primary legislation is listed in schedule 3 in the bill. Those are pieces of legislation that all relate to social work-related local authority functions and duties. We are also in the process of identifying all the relevant SSIs that may be affected if those functions were transferred. There has been a lot of work done already there, and where those adjustments are needed to SSIs to further reflect the transfer of functions that can be done using the ancillary powers in section 45 of the bill. I hope that that gives him a bit of a reassurance around that. I am afraid that he is going to have to repeat part of the second part of his question, and my apologies, Mr Day, for not scribbling that down. We have the legislative angle to that, but we also have the practical application of it, which is establishing pathways between a national children's care service and how it would interact with existing local eye services that were not captured by the bill. If we proceed, as we will, with a national care service for adult services and then need to make a decision not to proceed with children's services, we will need to establish new pathways there to ensure that everything works. What works in that area? Mr Stewart had already spoken about a phased approach in terms of roll-up VNCSO. It would be similar for children's services, where children's services are included within the NCS. We need to maintain strong links right across all the services that work with children, whether they are within or outwith a national care service. I touched on that a little bit, answering Mr Greer about education and early learning in childcare. We need to ensure that those links are built strongly, but we already have the underpinning of getting it right for every child that colleagues here will be familiar with. However, every day working for our health, social care and education staff is very well embedded in all those services and gives a really good strong foundation for how to work across disciplines and services for the best interests of that child. The work that we are doing currently in terms of the research that Celsus is carrying out and also our engagement with children and young people in terms of what they need to see from a national care service, what they have asked us, what they tell us is not working well for them, how they would like services to work better for them, which is essentially what this is about. It is about how it works better for children and families. We help to inform us going forward regardless of whether children's services are in the national care service or not. I think that we would all recognise that improvements have to be made right across children's services. Similarly to adult services, they experience postcode lotteries, they experience difficulties when they are crossing boundaries, local authority boundaries, one local authority may provide service X and the other local authority does not. We will continue an endeavour to work to improve children's services. We already have done a lot of work on that and I want to reference the promise. There is the whole family wellbeing fund, there is the launch of the new GERFEC practice guidelines that was launched just a short while ago. There has been a lot of work done, but we are not standing still regardless of whether children's services are included in the national care service or not. Mr Stewart said that he was in listening mode. I wonder if you are hearing the concerns that are being expressed by MSPs about the role of Parliament in this being moved forward, if that is what he decided to do. I am talking specifically about the volume of secondary legislation that would be required to deliver this. It is a substantial volume. Parliament is rightly expressing concern about that being the approach. Do you understand that concern? Of course, I understand that concern because Parliament has got a job to do in terms of scrutiny. However, to Mr Day's framework and enabling bill, it is not unusual that the way that the NHS was formed. I have given an answer to Mr Day earlier about some of the reasoning for this in terms of the flexibility of being able to make change in secondary legislation, which is not so easy to do in primary legislation. The SDS example that I gave earlier is a very good one, in which Parliament, with the best of intentions, wrote a piece of legislation that has some flaws in it that folk have dug into and have not constructed the spirit of that act. What we want to do is to create some flexibility so that we can adapt and be flexible as we go along in order to get the service delivery absolutely right. There is a logic to that, absolutely. However, what I would like to hear today is whether the Government, in principle at least, is willing to commit to a slightly different approach to this if it is taken forward, one that affords, whether it is this committee or other committees, a greater opportunity to scrutinise what is being proposed. Whether that takes the form of—I am talking beyond affirmative and super affirmative—is the Government willing to commit, in principle at least, to something along the lines of committees taking evidence, almost like a stage 1 proceeding, producing a report, et cetera, et cetera, and treating the secondary legislatures perhaps as something resembling a stage 2 process? That might give some colleagues a little bit more reassurance about their opportunity to further interrogate that if they decide to take it forward. I think that there are a number of elements to that, which are very different, because the co-design aspect is very different from what we have ever done before. It is not just the case of the scrutiny of us, per se, but what is the situation in terms of those folks who have helped us to shape the decisions to come to the point of the secondary legislation in the first place? Obviously, there will be consultation on that as well. That will be somewhat different. Without making any commitments in the here and now, I will reflect on what Mr Day has said here. A number of folk around the table have worked with me before in terms of tricky pieces of legislation. My door is open and I am willing to speak to anyone and everyone around about elements of that, whether that be informally or formally. However, I will certainly reflect on what Mr Day has said today. The research has been referred to a few times, so I will just spend a few minutes digging into that a little bit further. You have made it clear that no decision has been made and you have commissioned that research from Celis. Just very quickly, the background reasons for commissioning it and what is the timeline for that and how does that fit with the progress of the bill? I think that we have touched on this at the very beginning of the committee hearing when we were talking about why children's services have been considered as part of the national care service. The independent review of adult social care looked at adult social care. When the public consultation on the national care service was concluded, it was clear from that even though we had asked questions about children's services being included within the NCS, there were mixed responses to that, mostly on a lack of evidence. People felt that there was a lack of evidence behind why they would include NCS, whereas there had already been a large inquiry into adult social care. As part of an evidence-gathering exercise, we commissioned Celisus to carry out that independent research. Essentially, the research question was about how to ensure that children and young people in their families get the help that they need when they need it. That is what they have been commissioned to look at. There are five strands in that research to answer that question. A rapid evidence review of the published literature, a deep dive to examine the approaches to integration and delivery of children's services, national scoping and mapping exercise to explore the different models of integrated service delivery and any potential effects on a range of outcomes, and a national survey of the children's services workforce and children's services leaders to build on emerging findings and targeted focus groups and interviews with the workforce. Although that research will not give us a yes or no answer to that, it will give us an evidence basis on where we are, what is working and how does the workforce feel. Running it in parallel to that, we are also working with children and young people, families and organisations representing them and other groups to look again at what they feel they need from a national care service. We are not going back to ask them lots of questions that we already have evidence for. We have already got a lot of evidence from the review of the care services, but we will look at all that evidence in the round to make a decision in principle about whether children's services should or should not be included in a national care service. The research will take place over a year. It started in September 2022, so it will run until next September. The committee may be interested to know that those strands will report as they conclude. I am more than happy to share those reports with the committee if they would be interested in having that. I am not asking you to make a decision on that today, but the offer is there before it comes to the final write-up of the research. The timeline for the research has been developed to ensure that we can make those decisions in the inclusion of children's services so that they can be taken to run in parallel prior to the operation of the NCS. That is central to why the timeline is running as it is. That is quite helpful to get that context. I know that there was a concern that there was not enough evidence, so it stands as though the scope of this is quite wide. Are you confident that this research and the method of deployment on this is going to be enough to give you that evidence, and have you got an open mind that if it does not provide enough evidence that you are able to gather more? We will look at what the research tells us. We will also look at what the stakeholders and what the people involved in the service tell us. We are not looking at things in isolation. That is really important. We have spoken and Mr Stewart has spoken about co-design, so it is vital that we listen to those who use care services and hear their opinions on what the service for children should look like. As I said in my response to Mr Day, or might be Mr McGuire's apology, I said that the evidence-gathering consultation will not go to waste if children's services are not included in the NHS. What it will do is to help us to drive forward change that is needed, change that is wanted and change that will suit the needs of children and their families best. That leads me very neatly on to some questions to possibly Mr Stewart. We have quite rightly pointed out two sessions already on this committee, where we heard from a variety of stakeholders and service providers that you can provide any evidence during your consultation processes from advocacy groups or give some examples of the lived experience that you heard, where possibly the services have not been as good as they could have been for certain young people. We could provide many, many examples of where services have not delivered very well for people. Again, I would hearten back to what I said earlier. Some of the areas where there are real difficulties for folks are in transition stages from children's to adult services. Often, you probably have all had it in your mailboxes and in your mailboxes around about some young person leaving school and then left with nothing in terms of care and support, which obviously has a major impact on somebody with a disability or a learning disability. There are lots and lots of examples of where that transition has not worked. We could probably provide the committee with some very good examples. I am always a bit feared to give examples, because some of the examples that I have, you could end up with a situation where you could identify the individual because some of it is so complicated. I do understand that and respect that. I think that it would be very useful for the committee to hear from the perspective of the young person with their voice. That real-life example gives a good illustration of their experience of the service, so that is why I was keen to do that. We can provide you with many examples. I am quite sure that, in terms of the evidence that we have gathered, I do not know if Iona has got any to hand at the moment. I mean, it is a major strand of the work and the promise, clearly. It is very clear that the voice is there. We have been working with Who Cares Scotland and the committee for children and young people with disability, who are the two main groups that we engage with in terms of engagement and thinking about co-design. I think that variation in experiences is very real in children's services. There are lots of really good examples of good practice. The problem is that it is not consistent and it is not evenly spread across Scotland. That is the basic problem here. If the system was operating to the highest level of the best partnerships, we probably would not be sitting in this room talking about it. The reality is that it is not. From my point of view, we have the evidence from the service providers and stakeholders and the services that they provide. I want to be able to cross-check that with the real experience of the recipients of those services. That was the areas that I was exploring. I mean, I am happy for Mr Stewart to come back. I will come back very briefly. In some regards, one of the simple things to look at is to go back to self-directed support. In some parts of Scotland, children and young people are not being able to access self-directed support. It is as simple as that. If you talk to some of the stakeholders again, many of them will point out that in terms of joining up services for young people with similar care needs, that can be very different from one area to the next. Top quality service in one area makes sure that the linkages are all there and next in the hanging of the next. We have heard a lot about a phased approach and we have not really been given a timescale as to how long that may take for that big new organisation to be embedded. We have heard in the past from Mike Burns from Social Work Scotland that suggests that culture change takes five, ten or fifteen years. You have mentioned earlier on, Mr Stewart, that legislation and regulation does not bring about that change in culture. Given that it was taking so long for the integration legislation to get to this point, which still has problems, do you think that all these years of change and adjustment is worth it and should we not be focusing here and now on what we can improve on now? I think that we need to improve on the here and now as well. That is what we will continue to do as a Government across services, even in these tough financial times. What we actually require is a service that is fit for the future. A service that is built with people is very hard. At this moment, we have a huge amount of folks out there who receive care and support in order to survive. What we need to do is turn that around so that folks can thrive. That is the ambition of this. Person-centred, human rights at its heart, closing those implementation gaps by actually getting those folks who are receiving services at this moment, but also those folks who are at the front line helping to shape it. I think that we have got a huge opportunity here in terms of changing culture, because what we are finding at this moment in many parts of the country is that front-line staff have more autonomy and independence. That means better delivery for people. If the committee were minded to go out and about and speak to front-line staff in certain places, you will find without doubt that freedom and autonomy to the front line, which has been restricted and cod back in many places over the peace, is the right way forward. In so doing, we will improve services for people right across the board. Mr Stewart, we have had some informal sessions with the service deliveries, albeit from the voluntary sector, so we are aware of that. Can I go to a final question from Mr Willie Rennie, please? Mr Stewart, you have seen Darren Fitz Henry's contribution to the health committee yesterday where he has expressed concerns that would potentially give ministers sweeping powers to limit the scope of his investigations into social care complaints. What is your response to that? Ministers will not impose on any of those. What we are going to build here is a system that allows folk the opportunity to get redress, the right redress for their complaints. We are talking about improving the complaints system, and I do not see how I would describe things anyway. We want to get absolutely right complaints and redress. That is a major thing for the public at large, and that is one of the areas that we are absolutely adamant will get right. Thank you all for your time today, and the public part of our meeting is now at an end. We will consider our final agenda items in private. Thank you very much.